Brilliant journalist rockets to the top of a newsroom, then discovers that the traits that make a great reporter or writer are not the same — indeed, can sometimes be the very opposite — as the traits that make someone a capable newsroom leader.

At first blush, Jill Abramson’s brief tenure as executive editor of The New York Times looks like a striking new example of a familiar phenomenon — the miscast editor — in American journalism.

But three factors guarantee that this move will ricochet longer and more intensely than just another job shuffle atop a newspaper struggling to reinvent itself in a new era of media.

First is the uncommonly bloody manner of execution. Abramson had drawn criticism for her sometimes harsh personality, but certainly it was no harsher than the treatment handed her by former patrons. Times officials made no effort to pretend that her departure was anything other than involuntary, and made scant mention of achievements, which included eight Pulitzer Prizes under her watch. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. told newsroom staff that he forced a change because of “an issue with management in the newsroom.”

Second is gender. Abramson’s ascension less than three years ago as the first woman to lead the Times was widely hailed as a feminist triumph. And even her struggles in the job have tended to be viewed as a Rorschach test. Amid publicity, fueled largely by not-for-attribution complaints, about an allegedly remote and imperious management style, Abramson’s defenders asked whether such adjectives would have been hurled at a male editor. According to Capital New York, a sister publication of POLITICO, women at Wednesday’s staff meeting expressed concern to Sulzberger, who responded that as women get promoted into historically male jobs, they will also occasionally get fired from them.

Third is the larger question about the leadership and long-term vitality of the Times, an institution that remains in a tumultuous age of media arguably the most important and prestigious news organization in the world. Abramson is the third top executive in just over a decade whom Sulzberger has hired and then fired in high-profile fashion. Former Times CEO Janet Robinson was hired in 2004 but pushed out in December of 2011 with an eye-popping severance north of $20 million only months after Abramson took the reins as editor.

And in 2003 came the flamboyant flame-out of Howell Raines, who lost his job in the fallout from revelations that reporter Jayson Blair had plagiarized repeatedly and fabricated many of his most sensational stories, even as he was being mentored and promoted by important Times editors.

If Abramson proved to be the wrong choice, there is not any mystery about who made it. It was Sulzberger, in the face of a long record in which Abramson’s strengths and weaknesses as an editor were well-established, just as they had been with Raines.

There are a number of symmetries between the Raines and Abramson sagas — a surprising twist of plot given that the two were fierce internal rivals. Raines, according to present and former Times reporters, had tried to replace Abramson as Washington bureau chief, a move that she prevented by appealing to Sulzberger. Like Raines, Abramson turned heads as a reporter — in her case by fashioning an expertise on the intersection of money and politics. But in a notable departure from Raines’ own exit, there was no public humiliation of the Times that preceded Abramson’s dismissal.

Reached by phone Wednesday at his Pennsylvania home, Raines said he was unaware that Abramson’s tenure had ended.

“I didn’t know that,” he said chuckling lightly, commenting that he lives out in the country. “I’ve been gone for a long time from there.” He summed up his reaction in a single word: “surprise.”

Both Raines and Abramson struggled upon becoming executive editor for many of the same reasons — personalities that provoked intense backlashes within the Times newsroom long before their actual firings. Both seemed in the eyes of many colleagues to relish the title of executive editor and the prestige it conveyed more than the actual work of editing or managing the army of sensitive and idiosyncratic journalists necessary to produce a great daily newspaper.

Abramson’s management style was both intense — she would regularly question top editors about why the Times did not have certain stories — and detached from the day-to-day realities of running a major newspaper. Like Raines, she never made much of an effort to get to know members of the large New York office staff whom she did not already know or trust personally, and she was widely perceived (even by some of her supporters) as aloof.

In theory, Abramson’s credentials were impeccable — a star reporter and well-known author who had been adopted and mentored by some of the most formidable figures in the news business, including such luminaries as Al Hunt, Steven Brill and Tim Russert. In practice, she never seemed to embrace the job, and large parts of the newsroom never embraced her. A POLITICO article in April 2013 described a blowup in which managing editor Dean Baquet — now her replacement as executive editor — stormed out of a meeting and punched a wall in frustration with her, and said that many reporters were demoralized by her style.

Many female journalists at the Times and elsewhere said the piece was one-sided and unfair to her, and Abramson told Newsweek she cried when she read it. At the same time, she acknowledged to the magazine the truth of perceptions that “there’s ‘Good Jill’ and there’s ‘Bad Jill.’”

But that controversy occurred more than a year ago. Still unclear late Wednesday was precisely what Sulzberger was getting at with his vague but ominous phrase about “an issue with management in the newsroom.” The question remains: Was there something new or just an accumulation of doubts about her management style that have been percolating in a semi-public fashion? Did a dispute over compensation, itself infused with overtones of gender, hasten her dismissal — an assertion the Times denied?

Abramson, who was ranked fifth on Forbes magazine’s list of most powerful women, does not lack for fierce defenders.

Brill, one of Abramson’s first bosses, said by phone from his office at Yale University that he’s “very disappointed in what’s happened” but that he didn’t want to talk about the “who’s done what to whom.”

“From my perspective, she was pivotal in turning around the business of The New York Times by creating such a multimedia integration between digital and print,” Brill said.

Abramson led the charge during a volatile period at the newspaper, as paywalls went up, digital interactives became ever more sophisticated and mobile became dominant.

Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington called Abramson a “great journalist” who understood the need for the Times to evolve. “I remember how impressed I was that she came to the HuffPost office four years ago to absorb what we were doing. She brought a lot of wisdom and perspective to both her work and her life,” Huffington said in a statement.

Abramson also came by POLITICO for a long meeting with editors and reporters during that same tour that took her to HuffPo. The visit was a case study in how differently people react to her strong personality. After she left, some were impressed by her barrage of questions and comments as illustrative of how seriously she was taking her assignment of learning about the new digital media landscape. Some chafed at what they saw as condescension embedded in her questions.

ProPublica’s Jeff Gerth, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for the Times who once competed with Abramson before working with her, hailed Abramson as “resolute” and “principled,” calling her departure “a loss for New York Times readers.”

Yet some who worked with her said she fostered an atmosphere of insecurity by seeming to regard disagreement as a personal challenge or even betrayal. In contrast to her careful and fastidious style as a reporter, her opinions as editor, some believed, were prone to snap judgments that hardly braked for conflicting evidence or points of view. She struck a note of disdain for people who considered job offers elsewhere, as though the Times were the only worthy place to practice one’s craft, and even had a tattoo with the “T” of the Times — an institutional loyalty that did not protect her from the whims and changing moods of her own boss when the going got tough.

Her own career at the Times ended abruptly. Unlike executive editor Bill Keller, who left his post on mostly pleasant terms, even sticking around for a few years as a columnist, Abramson was not present Wednesday as her departure was announced and will have no continued role with the paper.

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, with whom Abramson co-wrote the book “Strange Justice,” said in an email that Abramson is “the best journalist I know” and one who has “strong opinions she is never afraid to express.”